The keynote talk from Xamarin Evolve 2016 is well worth watching, but not everyone has a spare 1h and 12 minutes to watch the whole thing, so here is a summary of the keynote so that you can immediately see the highlights, and go and watch any specific parts of interest to you.

Nat Friedman:

• 3 times as much interest in Xamarin since Microsoft bought them

Miguel de Icaza (CTO & cofounder – 10 mins):

• Xamarin is now open source: open.xamarin.com
• Xamarin are starting to use the real .NET Framework instead of mono
• There have been many recent improvements to Xamarin Studio
• iOS Simulator for Visual Studio is available, but you still need a Mac for iOS development
• iOS Simulator demo: you can test realistically on a Surface device
• iOS Simulator demo: you can test the iPad Pro pressure sensors
• Visual Studio USB remoting from Windows to Mac
• New to Xamarin Forms: Native Embedding APIs, improved Native Deep Linking

Nina Vyedin (30 mins)

• XAML stands for Xamarin and Microsoft Love
• Xamarin.Forms previewer: Realtime view of your app on each device as you update your XAML
• Available from Xamarin Alpha Channel

Miguel de Icaza (34 mins)

• Xamarin Workbooks demo
• Using Azure Emotion API and live update demo
• Earth, moon and 3600 satellites demo

Nat Friedman, James Montemagno and Nish Anil (48 mins)

• Building an app in 5 minutes on Azure with new DataPages feature
• Xamarin.Forms Themes: change theme with one line of code (55 mins)

Jessica Steger (56 mins)

• Test Recorder for Visual Studio Demo

Donovan Brown (DevOps Senior Program Manager, Microsoft – 58 mins)

• DevOps with Xamarin Test Cloud: Continuous Integration and Deployment, video playback of tested devices
• HockeyApp – download new versions directly to your device, bypassing the store. Crash diagnostics (1h 4min)
• Test Cloud Live – test your app on more than 2000 real devices via the cloud, and do live debugging! (1h 8 min)

Further Reading

Xamarin Evolve 2016 recap